Cherry Season

It is cherry season at the farmer's market, but I hear the Mexican grocery across the street from work has better prices. I got tasty but expensive cherries last week. This week I got slightly cheaper cherries so I could get some white nectarines too without going over budget. But this week's cherries were too cheap. They were almost all failed double cherries. There's a South Park episode highlighting the school nurse and her dead parasitic conjoined twin and that's what today's cherries look like. I pulled off most of the dead twins because they had the beginnings of rot on the edges, and dunked the remainder in the vinegar rinse. All in all, too much work to save a dollar on insufficiently delicious cherries. I should remember the grocery and try there next time.

The boy keeps calling me from his room and trying to talk softly so he can't be overheard and it just comes out like muddled mush. I think we agreed to go out tomorrow night, and that I can go to his new house chip tile mastic off the tiles I still need to pull up from the kitchen floor because I walked on the edges and loosened them too much. We'll see if that's what we actually agreed to. Or maybe he just was trying to talk dirty and I heard "you can get dirty at my house" a little differently than he intended.

I finally gave up on the book I've been reading all week, which in and of itself is a pretty big clue that it's not drawing me in sufficiently. It started out ok. But what started as irritating quirks that needed fixing showed themselves as bad habits in the hero, and an annoying tendency to look past some really appalling behavior on the part of the heroine and they never got better. Eventually it got to the point where the characters were TSTL, the primary antagonist was both meh and nonsensical and not worth the wait. After a while, I only kept reading for the train wreck factor - until there was an actual train reversing course on the track in front of the hero. And the hero went off on another binge instead of protecting his charge from harm, and the investigative reporter heroine couldn't find him at his last known address after a week of searching for him. Um? No. By that point, I couldn't even make it through the denouement. Yeah, they probably end up together since it's a romance but who cares anymore? Not this otter. I'd been assured that I'd like this author but so far, I am not impressed. The problems were such that I'm not inclined to give her other book on my TBR pile a chance.

So to leave with my three good things for today:

• It cheers me up to be greeted by name by the hydroponics ladies at the farmer's market.


• I did good work at work today. And got to take cool pictures. The better pictures will be SEMs tomorrow of today's experiments. But still, I'd managed to scratch the bejezus out of a scrap wafer and it made fun patterns in the next film. It's always the bad stuff and damage that makes for interesting photos and for me takes the sting out of something that is otherwise a failure when it is now art.


• Bridget's show on the travel channel is cute. I like it and her. She seems solid despite the icky sleeping with HH part - which certainly had its compensations, can't really hold him against her. She just comes off as friendly and has an honest enjoyment of living the good life, like she's always aware that she's having a good time and won't be taking it for granted. Honestly, though, she had me at "dogatonic". Now she's taking a helicopter tour and her first comment about taking off straight up being very cool was pretty much my first comment about helicopter flight too! How can you not like someone who eats deep fried key lime pie?


• And baby otters!